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How to launch a ten-year-in-the-making niche engine?

There are a lot of posts here from developers asking for advice on how to maintain enthusiasm for projects instead of chasing the next shiny idea. I seem to suffer from the opposite problem, whereby I've spent the majority of my free time over the last decade working on a single project - an engine and suite of tools for a very specific genre of game. I won't link to it here, as I'm genuinely not looking to publicise it at the moment, but lets just say it's for a genre, perhaps the only genre, that is regularly referred to as 'dead', hence why I consider my engine to be niche.

I started in 2008 around the birth of my daughter as an excuse to learn C#. After several changes of direction, the engine is nearing a level of maturity where I'm hoping to release it into the wild sometime in 2018. However I'm unsure of the best approach in terms of licensing and pricing given I don't expect to attract a huge number of users.

In an ideal world I'd love for this to be my full time job but I need to be realistic about the potential for return on the time investment I've made. At the least it would be great to be able to point to something tangible, like a paid off credit card or a deposit on a car, to help justify the late evenings spent hunched over a computer instead of with my long-suffering wife.

That said, it's also true that I've already reaped some benefits. Two job interviews (for non-game industry positions) have been successful in part from demoing my work. Likewise it has exposed me to a wide range of disciplines - cross-platform desktop development, console development, mobile apps, static documentation websites etc. - some of which have been useful in my current day job.

If I am to monetise the engine, it seems I have the following options:

1) Charge a small up-front license fee e.g. GameMaker Studio

Pros: Immediate remuneration.

Cons: I don't much like the idea of people paying for something that they may not make money from themselves. This may also result in the biggest support queue - time is limited and I'd prefer to put as much as I can into making technical improvements rather than managing expectations.

2) Charge fixed license fee only for released commercial products

Pros: No hobbyist is left out of pocket.

Cons: Commercial developers may be left out of pocket if the license fee is greater than their profits (i.e. if their game sells modestly).

3) Revenue Share

Pros: No developer will be out of pocket.

Cons: Not favourable to developers as they may be giving away a larger percentage of their profits than they are comfortable with, unless this is capped.

4) Open Source everything, receive individual commissions to make improvements

Pros: Potentially the most appealing to developers as this provides the most long term security.

Cons: Zero guarantee of any remuneration. Would also require several months work of code cleanup before I'm comfortable dumping it on Github (not necessarily a bad thing).

5) Don't release tools and engines yet - instead work on porting existing games to new platforms

Pros: No support queue, work directly with developers. Will help get the engine battle-ready ahead of any official release.

Cons: Not originally what I'd hoped to do. May stop pushing me to improve the supporting tools (i.e. usability) if focus shifts towards ports.

6) Patreon or other subscription-based crowdfunding

Pros: Potentially regular income, albeit volatile.

Cons: Godot is a popular, general purpose engine and only receives approximately £5K per month. It's unreasonable to expect my niche engine to receive a fraction of this, let alone anything sustainable. It would also be relying on a 3rd party for income, and Patreon's recent PR mistakes do not inspire confidence.

I'm going to be the harbinger of bad news: 4) and 5) are basically the only real options you have UNLESS you have some absolutely revolutionary engine, something so superior or different (in a good way) to all other engines that people would have to use your engine.

The problem is, I doubt your engine is that good. When there are already a handful of major game engines, the reality is you just don't have any leverage.

What is special about your engine? Can your engine truly do something that Unreal, Unity, and gamemaker can not do? I don't mean it can do one niche thing none of the above can do. I mean it has to be something real. Remember, those engines above have a community, reputation, resources, and so forth. Your engine has none of that.

Even if your engine does provide something unique over the others, it still has an inherent shortfall (as mentioned paragraph above). It will be next to impossible to convince any gamedevs to use your game engine without some very good reasons.

To summarize quickly:

You don't have a community.

No resources.

The stability of your engine is unknown.

The continuous work on your engine is unknown.

The updates on your engine is unknown.

Your engine has no reputation.

Your tools/engine are likely inferior to Unity/Unreal/Gamemaker.

People don't want to invest years worth of time in an engine they aren't sure of.

I don't like being the badman, but reality is tough. You likely don't have anything that will generate revenue.

Appreciate the feedback. To clarify, I do not expect to compete against the likes of Unreal & Unity - instead I am directly targeting a very small segment (tiny, really) of the industry, and figuring out the best way to carve out a slice. This is why my post was at pains to emphasise the niche nature of my engine, and my low expectations :)

You are correct that my engine is not revolutionary. It is however a somewhat more modern engine compared to existing alternatives in the genre - using .NET core for multi-platform support, integration with Visual Studio, C# scripting, coroutines without ugly yields etc. It also supports automatic conversion of games made using a competing engine which is well liked but has suffered from having second-class platform support, and thus offers a low-risk alternative. There is a small but existing community and I've been documenting my development progress through tweets and blog posts going back to November 2008.

So I don't quite agree with all of the above but suspect you are correct about 4 & 5 being the only viable options at the moment.

I would perhaps go off a donation system - it could prove more lucrative than you think if your engine is niche and allows someone as passionate as you to make their dream game.

Perhaps maybe take a modular approach - make testing and initial download free, but sell "release modules" for different platforms, such as Windows, OSX, Android and whatnot. Charge for those, similar to what GMS does.

Good guess. I hadn't really considered the modular platform approach, despite citing GMS in my original post. That may work as it will allow people to experiment with the desktop platforms before committing to mobile & console ports. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it some thought.

If it is an AGS alternative then I'd say working with that community would be very important. Reach out to them as soon as possible if you haven't already, just be friendly and humble and I'm sure you'd get interest. It's worth emailing the adventure creator people who'll probably be happy to relate their experience too.

Your first priority should be getting people using it imo. Build up a community of game makers before you consider any upfront cost. But locking platforms is a good idea, as an AGS user that moved to unity, thats the most important feature. The free version could also force your splash screen in games to give more incentive, plus there's patreon, etc. You can always add up front pricing in later versions.

it also supports automatic conversion of games made using a competing engine

Can you explain what this means? Does this mean I can convert my hypothetical Unity game into your engine game? Or what game engine games can be ported into your game engine? Or am I completely misunderstanding what you are saying?

Not Unity, but yes, that's the idea. I have the source code to various games written for another engine and currently two can be converted - code, assets and all - 100% automatically and are playable to completion. The rest convert with varying degrees of success and need some degree of manual intervention. Some of this is due to fundamental differences between the engines e.g. bitmap-based pathfinding vs vector-based pathfinding.

This is interesting. If it actually works as well as you say, you might have a chance. This is what I would personally do: Contact everyone and I mean EVERYONE who are developing games from the game engine that you can convert to yours. Explain to those game-devs why your engine is superior and that they can easily port their game from one engine to your engine.

Remember, keep the messages short. No one wants to read a book. The rule generally is to keep it as short as possible while still getting the full message across (I speak of hypocrisy when it comes to this point :P).

See what they respond. You might have a chance. If they show interest, then you actually do have leverage. Cold calling might be your only real chance. Just don't be discouraged if you don't get any replies. I know from my own experience cold calling has a very low return rate.

If they do show interest, then things get interesting. If they don't, back to 4) and 5).

Remember, personal friends and people you already know do NOT count as interest. They are called pity interest and are worthless when it comes to reality. Out there, past your chums, is a world of indifference. If you can get a response from that cruel world, then.

You're assuming I have any friends in the first place. I'd probably have some if I hadn't spent the last ten years working on this engine :)

Over the years I've built up a few contacts I'm friendly with, full time game developers who use the other engine, and who have previously expressed an interest. I guess I need to decide whether to approach them first or go all-out with a public release.

Thanks for your responses though, it has given me some things to think about (I hadn't considered blanket emails in the way you described).

For example, if Skyrim was Bethseda's first game and it was unknown until release, it would still skyrocket to one of the biggest games of all time. It would sell (likely significantly) fewer copies but among gamers it would be very well known. It would just take time and the money would trickle in slowly over the years.

That isnt DOA.

That is like planting a seed. It isnt a tree at first but eventually grows to the size of all others, unless it gets pruned by the gardner because it isnt beautiful.

It sounds like he has built extensible support for converting one game engines files to fit his files, that game engine being one he wants to compete with— that is also a niche engine (not Unity). This is how I read what he wrote.

to help justify the late evenings spent hunched over a computer instead of with my long-suffering wife.

Been there, done that, I wish you all the best trying to.

In the end though, I say that open sourcing is the way to go, using your own name, so that employers find you if they Google your name. That's what I did, and I landed a job over it. The wife was satisfied with that turn of event. If you want to make money over it, try offering paid support for people using your engine, but you'll need a community to field simplier questions before you get there.

Thanks! I'm glad your work in open source projects worked out well for you. I always look for MIT-licensed libraries, frameworks and tools where possible, so can totally understand why it's a preferable option for anyone looking to devote years of their life making a game. This may well be the route I go down.

I've ported a handful of short freeware games already, one inparticular served as a test case for an early Silverlight build and was also released on the Google Play Store.

The only game I've created completely from scratch was for an old DreamBuildPlay competition but was a fairly short experience. You are right though, I absolutely need to produce something from scratch again, to act as a dogfooding exercise more than anything else and find out where the pain points are. Up until now the main focus has been on ports.